College Rape Prevention Program Cuts Risk by 50%

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A new program aimed at helping college women avoid rape reduced
the risk of rape by nearly 50 percent during participants'
freshman year, a new study finds.

In the study, more than 400 women at three universities in Canada
took part in a rape resistance program, which consisted of four
3-hour sessions that included lectures, discussion on rape
prevention, and ways to practice what they learned. A second
group of more than 400 women was offered brochures with general
information about
sexual assault.

One year later, nearly 10 percent of the women in the brochure
group reported that they had been raped, where a perpetrator used
force, threats or incapacitating drugs to rape her. In contrast,
about 5 percent of women who participated in the rape avoidance
program reported being raped during that same period.

Women in the rape resistance group were also less likely to
experience an attempted rape, where the perpetrator tried to rape
the woman but was not successful. About 9 percent of the women in
the brochure group reported an attempted rape, compared with 3.4
percent of women who participated in the program, according to
the findings, published in the June 11 issue of the New England
Journal of Medicine.

Most college programs aimed at
preventing sexual assault have not been studied to see
whether they are effective, and the new program is so far the
only one to demonstrate that it can decrease instances of sexual
violence that women experience for at least a year, Senn said.

The new program — called the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act
Sexual Assault Resistance program — has several components. It
aims to help women identify situations where there is a high risk
for sexual violence, and figure out how they might create
disadvantages for potential perpetrators.

For example, being isolated — such as being in a room at a party
where no one can hear you — is advantageous to a perpetrator.
Therefore, to reduce the risk of being raped, a woman could make
sure that everyone at the party knows she is going to be in a
certain room, and ask people to come and get her at a certain
time, Senn said.

The program also helps women think about ways to overcome
emotional barriers to acting if the perpetrator is someone they
know, Senn said. One example of such a barrier could be that, if
a perpetrator is her roommate's boyfriend, a woman may delay
yelling or physically fighting off the perpetrator because she
thinks it would upset her roommate, Senn said.

Women who participate in the program also practice forceful
verbal and physical resistance, which are the most effective ways
of fighting back against perpetrators
of rape, Senn said.

Although women cannot control a perpetrator's behavior, women in
the resistance group were less likely to say they had experienced
an attempted rape, the researchers said. This may be because the
resistance program increased women's ability to detect dangerous
situations very early, and get out of those situations before
they progressed, Senn said.

No quick fix

Kate Carey, a professor of behavioral and social sciences at
Brown University School of Public Health who was not involved in
the new study, said the findings "clearly show a benefit of the
intervention, which substantially reduced the risk of completed
and attempted rape."

The new study improves upon earlier studies of sexual assault
prevention programs because it was larger, followed the
participants over a longer period, and looked at behavior
outcomes such as completed rape, rather than people's attitudes
or their intentions, Carey said.

The study also found that for every 22 women who completed the
program, one rape would be prevented over a one-year period,
which suggests that "dissemination [of the program] on campuses
could have [a] good return on investment," Carey said.

Senn said that other sexual assault prevention programs,
including ones that ask people in the community to speak up if
they see something dangerous happening, are still needed to
prevent sexual assault. "There is no quick fix. We need to make
stopping sexual violence everyone's issue," Senn said.

However, programs that focus on changing attitudes in an entire
community may take longer to have an effect. "We can't wait to
give women the tools they need to fight back," Senn said.

The researchers are currently developing sessions to train
instructors for the resistance program so that universities can
develop their own workshops based on the new program. In the
meantime, the full program scripts are available online in the
study appendix, Senn said.

The researchers noted that because women in the study
self-reported rape, it's possible that women in the resistance
group underreported assaults because they believed that they
should be able to resist them. But it's also possible that women
in the resistance group were more sensitized to sexual assaults,
which could increase reports of sexual assault in this group, the
researchers said."